Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It gives me great personal thrill to congratulate Srinath on successfully defending his PhD thesis in Computer Science in the area of management of large scale systems at Indiana University a few hours ago! I'm also a member of his phd committee and it was great to part of this historic occasion in his life!

Srinath is the root of WSO2 in many ways. As an intern at the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), along with Dimuthu Leelaratne (who's currently in WSO2 and is one of our security experts) and 2 others, were the ones who created AxisMora, a prototype re-write of Apache Axis1 to show that a pull-parser based SOAP engine could do wonders. In fact they got it to go 10x faster than Axis1. Srinath went on to lead the Axis2 effort that LSF ran in 2004/05 and then went to grad school in August 2005.

So, if not for Srinath .. no AxisMora .. no Axis2 and probably no WSO2; at least certainly not in the form we're in today! The seeds Srinath and company planted in 2003 have dramatically changed the world as we know it :-).

In fact, ALL 6 of the people who originally worked on Axis2/Java are now in the US working on PhDs in Computer Science! Going beyond that group, a total of more than 20 people who've gone thru WSO2 are now in computer science grad school all over the world (primarily US). That's part of the long term impact I wanted to have when LSF and later WSO2 was set up .. Srinath is proof of it working well :).

Srinath is the first to graduate from that group of people. Now we have a pipeline :). He's planning on returning to Sri Lanka soon, where I hope he will join WSO2 and help us compete even better in the world! (And also lead some projects in LSF to help others follow in his footsteps.)

CongratulationsDr. Srinath Perera! Its been an honor and privledge to have worked with you and I look forward to many more years together as colleagues!

Friday, March 13, 2009

My 13-year old son Rukmal just started blogging. In addition to all the usual 13-year old things, he loves playing around with Ubuntu with different themes as well as trying different distros. His first blog is about how to set up the new HP netbook experience on Ubuntu!

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

This is one of the many steps in re-uniting our country. 24 years is a long time ... but its great to see it finally happening! Of course its not a normal road yet by any means, but we can only hope for better times ahead ..